What internal communication means when nobody has a desk
Internal communication in a small charity is three different jobs that tend to share one channel, and the workplace is a shop floor, a van, a church hall and a kitchen table rather than an office. Internal comms software, the category the product pages describe, is built for the office. Announcements: the shop is closed on Monday, the safeguarding training is on the 24th, the new expenses form is attached. Coordination: who is covering Saturday, has the van been booked, can someone collect the donation from the school. And decisions: we agreed to stop the Tuesday session, the trustees approved the spend, the coordinator said the volunteer can start.
An intranet or an employee app is built for the first job in an organisation large enough to have a comms team. A messaging app is built for the second. The third is the one nobody plans for, and it is the one a charity has to be able to evidence later, because it is where the trustees' decisions, the volunteer's start and the complaint's first mention actually happen.
Start by writing down where each job happens today, before looking at internal communication software or any of the communication apps in section 03. In most small charities the honest answer is a personal WhatsApp group for coordination, email for the board, a noticeboard for announcements and the coordinator's memory for decisions. That map is more useful than any feature comparison, because the product you choose has to improve internal communication for the people who are actually doing it, on the devices they actually hold.
Two facts shape every option below. Volunteers are not employees: many give two hours a week, most have no work email, and none can be required to install anything. And the Charity Commission expects trustees to manage volunteers properly, with role descriptions, appropriate checks and clear arrangements; its guidance on managing volunteers is the frame the communication tool has to fit, not the other way round.
Decide these before you look at a product
Software comparisons ask which features you want. A charity needs to answer six plainer questions first, and the answers exclude most of the market.
- Who must be reachable, and by what. Staff with work email; volunteers with a phone number and nothing else; trustees who read email on Sunday evening. A tool that only reaches people with an account you administer will miss the people who do most of the work.
- What must be producible later. A trustee decision, a safeguarding concern, a complaint, a change to a volunteer's role. Decide which conversations are records and where the record lives, before choosing where the conversation happens. Our volunteer records guide covers the register those decisions feed.
- Who administers it. Who adds people, removes leavers, changes who can post announcements and answers the question at 9pm. If the answer is the same overworked coordinator, the tool must make removing a leaver a thirty-second job.
- What happens when someone leaves. Their access, the messages they hold and the group they created. A personal group belongs to whoever set it up; an organisation's channel belongs to the organisation.
- What it costs per person, including volunteers. Employee apps and intranets price per user per month. Forty volunteers who post twice a year are the same price as forty staff, which is why charities end up on free tiers and personal apps.
- What the free plan keeps. Free tiers are free because they discard history or cap members. That is fine for coordination and fatal for records. Check the vendor's own page for the limit before anyone relies on the search box.
Write the six answers on one page and take it to the board, with the stakeholders in mind: trustees, funders and the volunteers themselves. It is the internal communication strategy most small charities never quite write, and it takes an hour.
The realistic options, and what each one is for
Email and a mailing list. Reaches trustees and staff, misses volunteers who never open it, and is where the record of a board decision usually already lives. Keep it for governance; do not expect it to run Saturday.
Team messaging: Microsoft Teams, Slack, Google Chat. Built for organisations with accounts for everyone. Microsoft's Teams comparison page sets out what is included at each tier, and many charities have Microsoft 365 through the nonprofit programme already. Slack's free-plan limitations page is explicit that message history is limited on the free version. Both work well for staff. Both struggle with a volunteer who will not create an account for two hours a week, and guest access is where the administration effort goes.
An employee app or intranet. Products in this category, sometimes sold as a digital workplace, are good at company-wide announcements to a frontline workforce: a central hub for company news, push notifications and alerts, a newsletter, document libraries, onboarding workflows and reach reporting that shows whether every employee opened the message. Some add video conferencing and productivity tools. Intranet software of this kind assumes a comms function and a per-user budget, and in a small charity the announcement problem is usually the easy one. The employee communication claims are real for a remote team of hundreds; test them against forty volunteers on a rota.
A volunteer management system's messaging. If the charity already runs a rota and a register in one, its built-in messaging keeps coordination next to the record, which is a real advantage. Check whether it reaches people who are not on the rota, such as trustees, and what it exports.
The personal WhatsApp group. Reaches everyone, costs nothing, and is administered by whoever created it on their own phone, with everyone's personal number visible to everyone else. It cannot be audited by the charity, cannot be exported by the charity and cannot be handed over when the administrator leaves. Our work messaging guide compares this honestly with the alternatives, including what free plans do to history.
A governed channel. A messaging product the organisation owns, where the record is the organisation's rather than the individual's. This is the category ComplyChat is in, and section 06 says where it fits and where it does not.
None of these is wrong. The mistake is choosing one for the announcement job and discovering it is now carrying the decision job with no record, or choosing one for staff and discovering the volunteers stayed where they were.
Personal devices, security and data protection
Whatever you choose will run on phones the charity does not own. The National Cyber Security Centre's bring-your-own-device guidance says BYOD "requires careful design" and balances "the organisation's need to protect its data and systems against the usability, and privacy expectations of the device owner". Its policy questions are the right ones for a charity: "What tasks will employees be permitted or encouraged to do from their own devices? What will they not be permitted to do?", what data will be exposed, and "How will you handle an employee changing their device, changing their role, or leaving the organisation? What method will you use to remove access and corporate data?"
The NCSC is candid about the limit: employees "may not like the idea of their employer being able to remotely wipe their entire device", and a charity has no more right than any employer to reach into a volunteer's phone. So the design goal is that the charity's information should not need reaching for. Keep service-user details, safeguarding concerns and personal data about volunteers out of the general channel, so that the general channel can be used freely and the restricted information lives where access is controlled.
Data protection follows. The ICO's storage-limitation guidance applies to messages as much as files: personal data in a channel needs a purpose and a retention decision. Adding an external person to a group shares every member's number with them. Removing a leaver from a channel does not remove what they already downloaded. A short, honest note in the charity's privacy notice about which tools carry personal data, and the volunteer agreement saying what may and may not be posted, do more than a long acceptable-use policy nobody reads.
Security in practice for a small charity is four habits: every account has its own login and the charity can remove it; two-step verification is on where the product offers it; nothing restricted is posted to the wide group; and the administrator role belongs to a role, not a person, so that it survives a departure.
Making it work for people who give two hours a week
Adoption is the problem the product pages call employee engagement, and the honest measure is reach: whether a real-time notification on a mobile app reached every person who needed it, not how many were sent. For a volunteer it is simpler: will the message about Saturday reach the person doing Saturday, and can they reply without being asked to install, register and remember a password for something they use twice a month?
Three things help. Separate announcements from discussion, so that the message that matters is not buried under forty replies about the raffle. Give every channel one purpose and one owner, so that a new volunteer can tell where to ask. And test reach rather than assume it: after a real announcement, ask the coordinator whether anyone on the rota did not see it. That answer is your engagement metric, and it costs nothing.
The NCSC's warning about badly designed BYOD applies to communication tools generally: make the approved route awkward and people build their own, usually a personal group nobody told the charity about. The tool that wins is the one the Saturday team would have chosen anyway, with the charity's name on it.
Onboarding is where most of it is decided: a new volunteer should be added to the right channels on their first day by whoever holds the administrator role, with a two-line note on what goes where. Review the internal communication tools once a year with the volunteers, not for them. Ask what they use, what they ignore and what they wish they could find. Then fix the channel list before you fix the software.
The decisions that arrive in the chat
Whichever tool you choose, the decision job will follow the coordination job into it. The trustee who says "yes, go ahead" in the group has made a decision the charity may need to evidence. The coordinator who confirms a volunteer can start on Saturday has changed a record. The message that a service user seemed unwell is the first line of a concern. If those live only in one person's message history, the charity has a communication app and no record.
Agree the rule before the tool: which conversations need transferring into the approved system, who does it and by when. A trustee decision goes to the minutes. A change to a volunteer's role goes to the register. A concern goes to the safeguarding lead and the safeguarding file. The chat is where it started; the record is where it must end.
ComplyChat provides a channel the charity owns for those work conversations. On paid plans, the lasting record files into the organisation's own Microsoft 365 once the archive is connected and filing, so a decision made in the channel is producible later without depending on anyone's phone. It is not an intranet, not a volunteer database and not a tool for messaging supporters or donors. ComplyChat Free is personal messaging with one private group, direct messages, up to 25 staff members and three calendar months of recent history; it has no Microsoft 365 archive or Replay, and upgrading cannot restore expired history. It is a way for a small team to try the messaging experience before the charity decides what it needs to keep.
A useful question for the next trustees' meeting: of the decisions we made this quarter, how many exist only in a message on someone's phone, and which of those would we need to show a funder, an auditor or the Commission?
Official guidance and your next step
The sources for this guide are the Charity Commission's guidance on managing volunteers, the NCSC's bring-your-own-device collection, the ICO's UK GDPR guidance and the vendors' own plan pages linked above, read on 12 September 2026. Product limits change; check the vendor's page before relying on one.
This is a decision guide for small charities in the UK, not advice on any particular product contract or on your data protection obligations in a specific case. Your trustees, your data protection lead and your safeguarding lead should review the parts that apply.
Then do one thing: hold the one-hour meeting in section 02, answer the six questions, and write the channel list on a single page. Choose the software second.
We build ComplyChat for the work conversations organisations need to keep. Small charities are where the gap between the chat and the record is widest, because the people are volunteers and the phones are their own. Explore Free personal messaging, or compare the paid plans if your charity needs a lasting Microsoft 365 archive.
